No Room! No Room! The Costs of the British Town and Country Planning System
9 January 2025
SUGGESTED
Healthcare
27 December 2024
Economics
17 January 2025
Lifestyle Economics
9 December 2024
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I stumbled across a copy of Professor Alan Evans’s book No Room! No Room! in one of the IEA’s archives a few years ago when I was looking for something completely unrelated, started reading a few paragraphs, and quickly got lost in it.
That is not unusual: it is very easy to get lost in the IEA’s archives in this way. But something was different about this book.
Normally, the charm of our older publications is that they can act as a window into a bygone era. I remember, for example, a publication from the 1970s, which, among other things, discussed the role of worker cooperatives in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)—a state which has long ceased to exist. I remember a book discussing the costs and benefits of Britain’s EU membership, as well as potential alternatives to it, long before ‘Brexit’ was even a word.
What was special about Professor Evans’s book, though, was that, despite the old-fashioned typesetting (and the fact that it still contained a fax number as part of the address), it felt as if it had been published last week. If you are looking for an introduction to the causes and consequences of Britain’s housing crisis, No Room! No Room! still does the job remarkably well, after all these years—better, in fact, than a lot of the things that are being published on the subject today!
It is difficult to overstate how far ahead of his time Professor Evans was. A peculiarity of Britain’s housing crisis is that, even though it had a very long lead time, building up over the course of several decades, it nonetheless did not fully manifest itself in its current form until very late in the day.
Today, in 2025, to say that Britain has a housing crisis is a statement of the obvious, which only a few contrarians would deny. In the last general election, all major parties felt obliged to dedicate a section of their manifestos to the housing crisis, however inadequate or wrongheaded their proposed policy solutions may have been. Even NIMBY organisations, however implausible, feel compelled to express some support for housebuilding in the abstract, provided it is ‘the right kind of housing’ in ‘the right places’ (although, of course, ‘the right kind’ is always some other kind, and the ‘the right place’ is always somewhere else).
It is easy to see why the subject is so prominent:
This measure simulates a situation where every household rents the home they currently live in at market rates. For private renters, it simply records the rent that they actually pay; for everyone else, it estimates the rent that they would pay if they were private renters.
Although ‘supply-side denial’ refuses to go away, it is also widely accepted that the problem is, first and foremost, a lack of supply. Again—it is easy to see why:
Britain has an overall shortage of housing rather than a narrow and specific shortage of social housing. One in six housing units in the UK are in the social rented sector. That is more than twice the EU average or the OECD average (OECD 2024b).
While high levels of net immigration (or more precisely, the combination of high levels of net immigration with an inelastic housing supply) have undoubtedly contributed to the problem, the overall population growth rates we have seen over the past quarter-century or so have not been particularly unusual: neither in an international nor in a historical perspective. It is really the 1970s and early 1980s, when the UK population was almost stagnant, which is the unusual period.
All in all: today, recognizing that Britain is suffering from a major housing shortage does not require particular expertise or analytical skill. (Quite the opposite: it is now so obvious that it takes special skills and sophistry to continue to deny it!)
This was all very different in 1988. A few words on the history of Britain’s housing crisis may be useful:
In the second half of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, Britain’s housing stock used to grow by between 1% and 2% almost every year (housing completions minus demolitions divided by the total housing stock), the bulk of which was private sector development (Watling 2023). Thus, the growth rate of the housing stock exceeded the rate of population growth.
While we generally associate the Victorian/Edwardian era with overcrowded and unsanitary slum housing, it was also an era of steady improvements in housing quality and affordability. The housing affordability ratio fell from more than 12 in the mid-nineteenth century to less than 6 in the early twentieth century (Lamont 2023).
Housebuilding rates collapsed during World War I, but then climbed up again. In the 1920s, they exceeded the pre-war level, and during the building boom of the 1930s, they peaked at about 3% (Watling 2023). Housing affordability ratios now stood at just over four—the lowest they had ever been for a sustained period (Lamont 2023).
The housing boom was abruptly cut short by the outbreak of World War II, with housebuilding rates collapsing to zero. That much is unsurprising, and unremarkable. What is remarkable is that they did not fully recover after World War II, in the way they had after World War I. Given pent-up demand and wartime destruction, the postwar housing boom should have at least matched, and possibly surpassed, the housebuilding rates of the interwar boom. But that did not happen.
There was a postwar building boom of sorts, but it fell short of the interwar boom, as well as the Western European average. More precisely: private sector housebuilding rates fell far short of either the domestic historic norm or the levels observed elsewhere in Western Europe, while public sector housebuilding rates were only a partial substitute (Watling and Breach 2023; Watling 2023).
Even this unimpressive postwar boom was not sustained. Housebuilding rates began to drop sharply in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, they had fallen to below 1% per annum (which is where they have remained to this day).
By the time Professor Evans wrote No Room! No Room!, the UK had already squandered the lead it had once enjoyed over the Western European average in terms of housing supply. In the 1950s, the UK still had a higher number of housing units per 1,000 inhabitants than, for example, Switzerland, West Germany or Finland. But the former two overtook the UK around 1970, and the latter around 1980. In the meantime, Sweden, Denmark and France, which had already enjoyed a small lead over the UK in the 1950s, had extended that small lead to a large one (Watling and Breach 2023: 20-1 & 40-1). Britain had similarly fallen behind in terms of floorspace per dwelling (Watling and Breach 2023: 22-3).
So, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that when Professor Evans wrote No Room! No Room!, Britain already had all the ingredients of the present-day housing crisis in place.
But ‘with the benefit of hindsight’ is doing some heavy lifting here. We can see this today because we take the housing crisis of the 2020s as the starting point and work our way backwards from here. Professor Evans did not have that option.
If we looked at standard measures of housing affordability, we would not necessarily get the impression that Britain in 1988 was a country on the brink of a housing crisis. It was only from the 1990s onwards that housing affordability drastically worsened on every measure. In the UK as a whole, house prices doubled in real terms between 1995 and 2003, and increased one-and-a-half-fold again since then, or in other words, they are now three times higher in real terms than they were in 1995 (OECD 2024c). In England, the aforementioned housing affordability ratio increased from less than four in 1998 to more than five in 2002, more than six in 2004, more than seven in 2007, and more than eight today (ONS 2024).
This means that No Room! No Room! predates the housing crisis in the way most of us use that term today. Which raises the question: how did Professor Evans manage to see things so clearly so far back?
His starting point is a remarkably simple one. He observed that the increase in house prices that had already taken place since the mid-1970s or so could be almost entirely explained by the increase in the price of the land underneath. Britain’s house price inflation was really a land price inflation.
But it was not even the price of ‘land’ per se that was the issue: it was specifically land with planning permission. The price of land without planning permission had barely budged. If land of one type (residential) is scarce, while land of another type (agricultural) is abundant, then in any halfway rational system, we would expect a conversion of land of the abundant type into land of the scarce type. So why was that conversion not happening?
Professor Evans’s answer was:
“The planning system has evolved over time from a system designed to guide development into what is regarded by the planners as ‘socially optimal’ land use into a system to control and restrict development.”
The words ‘NIMBY’ and ‘NIMBYism’ had not yet caught on in British English (that would happen two years later; see Ehrman 1990), so they do not appear in this book. But the concept certainly does, even if it does not have a name:
“At present residents always oppose any development near to them. Only the extent of their opposition varies, and that can be measured by the amount of pressure put on local councillors to turn down planning applications by lobbying, petitions, letters, public meetings, and so on.”
Evans already noticed a major asymmetry in the planning system, which has only become more severe since then: while it is easy to mobilize the opponents of housebuilding, it is almost impossible to mobilize the potential beneficiaries, who cannot be identified in advance:
“The future occupiers of the development […], who in one sense are those most affected by the decision, are usually unrepresented when the decision over land-use is made.”
No Room! No Room! is not the first-ever critique of Britain’s postwar land use planning system, or of NIMBYism. It is not even the first IEA publication on land and housing. But it has to be one of the first studies which describe what a present-day reader will immediately recognize as a preview of Britain’s present-day housing crisis (as opposed to more general inefficiencies in the land and housing market).
It is also a pioneering study in that it already recognizes that Britain’s housing shortage is not just a problem in its own right. It gives rise to a raft of second-order and third-order effects.
For a start, Britain does not just have a shortage of residential housing, but also a shortage of business premises, such as offices, retail outlets, and hospitality venues. In this way, the planning system raises consumer prices and depresses wages across the board, in a whole range of sectors of the economy.
Secondly, the planning system is in itself costly to administer, and it imposes additional compliance costs on businesses, as well as adding considerable uncertainty to business operations.
Thirdly, Britain’s housing shortage is not a symmetric problem affecting all parts of the country to the same degree. It is a highly asymmetrical problem, which tends to be worst in the most productive and prosperous parts of the country. It therefore discourages people from moving from low-productivity to high-productivity regions, thus holding back Britain’s overall productivity:
“[T]he house price differential […] acts to choke off this migration. House owners in the north find that they would be worse off if they sold up and moved, even if it meant moving out of unemployment into employment. Moreover, the problem appears to have been particularly evident for middle managers who have been unwilling to move south because they could not afford equivalent housing.”
Fourthly, it depresses savings and investment. When homeowners see large increases in their property wealth year after year, this reduces incentives to build up other forms of asset wealth, namely, by saving: their house, in a sense, does the saving for them. But while an individual household may be indifferent between having either an expensive house or a large savings account, from an economic perspective, the two are very much not equivalent. Too much of Britain’s savings are unproductively tied up in bricks and mortar.
And so on. What this means is that the housing crisis is not just one problem among many. Rather, it lies at the heart of most of Britain’s economic and social problems, and where it is not the primary cause, it is, at the very least, a major amplifier. All of these effects do not just persist to this day; they are vastly greater in magnitude now than they were then.
I will stop just short of calling Professor Evans a prophet. There are a few passages in the book which show that he was not, after all, a time traveler from 2025. For example, for Professor Evans, ‘development’ still mostly meant ‘towns and cities growing outwards, like they used to in the interwar period.’ He treated urban densification as an undesirable side effect of the restrictions on outward development, rather than as part of the solution. We now know that urban densification, renewal, and redevelopment also have a major role to play, and that planning restrictions and NIMBYism block those just as effectively as they block other forms of development. Nor am I convinced by his assessment that NIMBYs are essentially reasonable people, who just respond rationally to incentives. More recent developments suggest that NIMBYism is much more like a lifestyle choice than a response to the particulars of any development project. Nor did Professor Evans have much to say about the forms of NIMBYism that prevent activities such as infrastructure development or energy generation, which already existed then, even if they were not nearly as prominent as now.
Still: I enjoy the benefit of more than three and a half decades’ worth of hindsight, and even so—these comparatively minor criticisms are the best I can come up with. It would be an understatement to say that No Room! No Room! has aged exceptionally well.
Regardless, some readers will probably wonder: what is the point of republishing such an old study rather than writing a new and up-to-date one? Because, no matter how well No Room! No Room! may have aged—aged, it nonetheless has, and a lot of new information has emerged after that date.
The answer is: it is precisely the fact that this publication is, by definition, completely free from any form of hindsight bias which makes it so much more powerful. The point we want to make by republishing this study in its original form is precisely that it was already possible even then, based solely on the information that was available at the time, to see the outlines of Britain’s emerging housing crisis. Professor Evans did not have access to the volumes of literature on urban economics that have been published since then. He did not know how house prices, rents, housing affordability ratios or other measures were going to evolve over the coming decades. And he did not need to know any of that to get the basics right.
The fact that it was possible to see this so clearly as far back as 1988 makes it all the more scandalous that we have still not made any progress toward solving this issue. If it was already possible to know all this in 1988—what excuse could present-day housing policymakers possibly have for still not doing anything about it? What excuse could present-day housing commentators possibly have for continuing to obfuscate and muddy the waters?
This is why republishing the original book is a more powerful statement than writing a new one would have been.
I have added the occasional footnote in order to gently update the text a little, but without messing around with the original text, or disrupting the flow. The reader can, of course, choose to ignore those additional footnotes (which I have marked with my initials, KN), and just read this as an unaltered text from 1988. I have made no changes whatsoever to Professor Evans’s text, footnotes, or references, with the exception of one study which was published in 1989, and which was still listed as ‘forthcoming’ in the original.
While the problems Professor Evans originally identified in 1988 are all immeasurably worse today, the one silver lining is that unlike then (and indeed, unlike even a few years ago!), there now is a counter-reaction to the powerful NIMBY lobby. The small but vocal ‘YIMBY’ (Yes In My Back Yard) movement is a cross-ideological coalition, which is rare in these politically tribal times, when political opinions are more likely to come as set menus rather than pick-and-mix buffets. YIMBYs can be found on the centre-left, the centre, the centre-right, and, of course, among classical liberals and libertarians.
Among other things, No Room! No Room! can be read as a very early (proto-)YIMBY manifesto. It did not have anything like the influence on policy that it would have deserved, but it certainly helped to establish the IEA as a trailblazer for ‘YIMBYism’ (although that term would not enter British English until the late 2010s).
Other major IEA publications in the YIMBYism workstream include books such as Fifty Years of the Town and Country Planning Acts: Time to Privatise Land Development Rights? (Corkindale 1998), Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-Use Planning (Pennington 2002), and The Land Use Planning System: Evaluating Options for Reform (Corkindale 2004). I joined the fray in 2012, with a chapter on housing in my book Redefining the Poverty Debate – Why a War on Markets is No Substitute for a War on Poverty (Niemietz 2012).
While we take a certain pride in the consistency of our research output, and the fact that these publications tend to have a long shelf life—ideally, we would not want them to. Because, ultimately, the reason why No Room! No Room! still feels topical today is that nothing has improved. We would prefer to write a follow-up publication on how these old arguments are now no longer relevant, because the obstacles that once existed have been overcome, and Britain is successfully solving its housing crisis. Or, better still, one day, we would like a publication on the housing crisis to feel as quaint and out of date as a publication on the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia does today.
KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ
Editorial Director, Institute of Economic Affairs
London, January 2025
IEA_No Room No Room new edition_V2_Digital
Contents
New foreword to the 2025 edition
I stumbled across a copy of Professor Alan Evans’s book No Room! No Room! in one of the IEA’s archives a few years ago when I was looking for something completely unrelated, started reading a few paragraphs, and quickly got lost in it.
That is not unusual: it is very easy to get lost in the IEA’s archives in this way. But something was different about this book.
Normally, the charm of our older publications is that they can act as a window into a bygone era. I remember, for example, a publication from the 1970s, which, among other things, discussed the role of worker cooperatives in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)—a state which has long ceased to exist. I remember a book discussing the costs and benefits of Britain’s EU membership, as well as potential alternatives to it, long before ‘Brexit’ was even a word.
What was special about Professor Evans’s book, though, was that, despite the old-fashioned typesetting (and the fact that it still contained a fax number as part of the address), it felt as if it had been published last week. If you are looking for an introduction to the causes and consequences of Britain’s housing crisis, No Room! No Room! still does the job remarkably well, after all these years—better, in fact, than a lot of the things that are being published on the subject today!
It is difficult to overstate how far ahead of his time Professor Evans was. A peculiarity of Britain’s housing crisis is that, even though it had a very long lead time, building up over the course of several decades, it nonetheless did not fully manifest itself in its current form until very late in the day.
Today, in 2025, to say that Britain has a housing crisis is a statement of the obvious, which only a few contrarians would deny. In the last general election, all major parties felt obliged to dedicate a section of their manifestos to the housing crisis, however inadequate or wrongheaded their proposed policy solutions may have been. Even NIMBY organisations, however implausible, feel compelled to express some support for housebuilding in the abstract, provided it is ‘the right kind of housing’ in ‘the right places’ (although, of course, ‘the right kind’ is always some other kind, and the ‘the right place’ is always somewhere else).
It is easy to see why the subject is so prominent:
- The housing affordability ratio, which is the ratio of median house prices to median full-time annual gross earnings, stands at above eight in England as a whole, at around ten in the East and the South East of England, and at just below twelve in London (ONS 2024).
- Private sector rents stand at 26% of the median gross incomes of people in the private rental sector in England as a whole, at around 29% in the West Midlands, the South West and the South East, and at just below 35% in London (ONS 2023).
- Imputed rents in the UK represent 22% of total household consumption, which is the second-highest share in the OECD, and five percentage points above the OECD average of 17% (Corlett & Judge 2024).
This measure simulates a situation where every household rents the home they currently live in at market rates. For private renters, it simply records the rent that they actually pay; for everyone else, it estimates the rent that they would pay if they were private renters.
Although ‘supply-side denial’ refuses to go away, it is also widely accepted that the problem is, first and foremost, a lack of supply. Again—it is easy to see why:
- The UK has fewer housing units per 1,000 people than most other OECD countries (OECD 2024a). To merely catch up with the EU average, Britain would have to build 3.4 million additional homes. Matching the housing stock of German-speaking Europe would require closer to 5 million homes.
- Britain does not just have fewer housing units than most comparable countries do, but also unusually small ones, with less residential floorspace per household, or per person, than most of its peers (Corlett & Judge 2024; World Population Review 2024). Even in Japan, which has long been associated with crammed, tiny flats, homes are, on average, slightly larger than in Britain.
- There is hardly any slack in the British housing market. Britain has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the OECD, with only around 1 in 20 housing units being unoccupied at any given time (OECD 2024a). The long-term vacancy rate is less than 1% of the housing stock, and it is lowest in the South East and London (Open Innovations 2024). Britain also has one of the lowest shares of second-home ownership.
Britain has an overall shortage of housing rather than a narrow and specific shortage of social housing. One in six housing units in the UK are in the social rented sector. That is more than twice the EU average or the OECD average (OECD 2024b).
While high levels of net immigration (or more precisely, the combination of high levels of net immigration with an inelastic housing supply) have undoubtedly contributed to the problem, the overall population growth rates we have seen over the past quarter-century or so have not been particularly unusual: neither in an international nor in a historical perspective. It is really the 1970s and early 1980s, when the UK population was almost stagnant, which is the unusual period.
All in all: today, recognizing that Britain is suffering from a major housing shortage does not require particular expertise or analytical skill. (Quite the opposite: it is now so obvious that it takes special skills and sophistry to continue to deny it!)
This was all very different in 1988. A few words on the history of Britain’s housing crisis may be useful:
In the second half of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth century, Britain’s housing stock used to grow by between 1% and 2% almost every year (housing completions minus demolitions divided by the total housing stock), the bulk of which was private sector development (Watling 2023). Thus, the growth rate of the housing stock exceeded the rate of population growth.
While we generally associate the Victorian/Edwardian era with overcrowded and unsanitary slum housing, it was also an era of steady improvements in housing quality and affordability. The housing affordability ratio fell from more than 12 in the mid-nineteenth century to less than 6 in the early twentieth century (Lamont 2023).
Housebuilding rates collapsed during World War I, but then climbed up again. In the 1920s, they exceeded the pre-war level, and during the building boom of the 1930s, they peaked at about 3% (Watling 2023). Housing affordability ratios now stood at just over four—the lowest they had ever been for a sustained period (Lamont 2023).
The housing boom was abruptly cut short by the outbreak of World War II, with housebuilding rates collapsing to zero. That much is unsurprising, and unremarkable. What is remarkable is that they did not fully recover after World War II, in the way they had after World War I. Given pent-up demand and wartime destruction, the postwar housing boom should have at least matched, and possibly surpassed, the housebuilding rates of the interwar boom. But that did not happen.
There was a postwar building boom of sorts, but it fell short of the interwar boom, as well as the Western European average. More precisely: private sector housebuilding rates fell far short of either the domestic historic norm or the levels observed elsewhere in Western Europe, while public sector housebuilding rates were only a partial substitute (Watling and Breach 2023; Watling 2023).
Even this unimpressive postwar boom was not sustained. Housebuilding rates began to drop sharply in the 1960s, and by the 1980s, they had fallen to below 1% per annum (which is where they have remained to this day).
By the time Professor Evans wrote No Room! No Room!, the UK had already squandered the lead it had once enjoyed over the Western European average in terms of housing supply. In the 1950s, the UK still had a higher number of housing units per 1,000 inhabitants than, for example, Switzerland, West Germany or Finland. But the former two overtook the UK around 1970, and the latter around 1980. In the meantime, Sweden, Denmark and France, which had already enjoyed a small lead over the UK in the 1950s, had extended that small lead to a large one (Watling and Breach 2023: 20-1 & 40-1). Britain had similarly fallen behind in terms of floorspace per dwelling (Watling and Breach 2023: 22-3).
So, with the benefit of hindsight, we can say that when Professor Evans wrote No Room! No Room!, Britain already had all the ingredients of the present-day housing crisis in place.
But ‘with the benefit of hindsight’ is doing some heavy lifting here. We can see this today because we take the housing crisis of the 2020s as the starting point and work our way backwards from here. Professor Evans did not have that option.
If we looked at standard measures of housing affordability, we would not necessarily get the impression that Britain in 1988 was a country on the brink of a housing crisis. It was only from the 1990s onwards that housing affordability drastically worsened on every measure. In the UK as a whole, house prices doubled in real terms between 1995 and 2003, and increased one-and-a-half-fold again since then, or in other words, they are now three times higher in real terms than they were in 1995 (OECD 2024c). In England, the aforementioned housing affordability ratio increased from less than four in 1998 to more than five in 2002, more than six in 2004, more than seven in 2007, and more than eight today (ONS 2024).
This means that No Room! No Room! predates the housing crisis in the way most of us use that term today. Which raises the question: how did Professor Evans manage to see things so clearly so far back?
His starting point is a remarkably simple one. He observed that the increase in house prices that had already taken place since the mid-1970s or so could be almost entirely explained by the increase in the price of the land underneath. Britain’s house price inflation was really a land price inflation.
But it was not even the price of ‘land’ per se that was the issue: it was specifically land with planning permission. The price of land without planning permission had barely budged. If land of one type (residential) is scarce, while land of another type (agricultural) is abundant, then in any halfway rational system, we would expect a conversion of land of the abundant type into land of the scarce type. So why was that conversion not happening?
Professor Evans’s answer was:
“The planning system has evolved over time from a system designed to guide development into what is regarded by the planners as ‘socially optimal’ land use into a system to control and restrict development.”
The words ‘NIMBY’ and ‘NIMBYism’ had not yet caught on in British English (that would happen two years later; see Ehrman 1990), so they do not appear in this book. But the concept certainly does, even if it does not have a name:
“At present residents always oppose any development near to them. Only the extent of their opposition varies, and that can be measured by the amount of pressure put on local councillors to turn down planning applications by lobbying, petitions, letters, public meetings, and so on.”
Evans already noticed a major asymmetry in the planning system, which has only become more severe since then: while it is easy to mobilize the opponents of housebuilding, it is almost impossible to mobilize the potential beneficiaries, who cannot be identified in advance:
“The future occupiers of the development […], who in one sense are those most affected by the decision, are usually unrepresented when the decision over land-use is made.”
No Room! No Room! is not the first-ever critique of Britain’s postwar land use planning system, or of NIMBYism. It is not even the first IEA publication on land and housing. But it has to be one of the first studies which describe what a present-day reader will immediately recognize as a preview of Britain’s present-day housing crisis (as opposed to more general inefficiencies in the land and housing market).
It is also a pioneering study in that it already recognizes that Britain’s housing shortage is not just a problem in its own right. It gives rise to a raft of second-order and third-order effects.
For a start, Britain does not just have a shortage of residential housing, but also a shortage of business premises, such as offices, retail outlets, and hospitality venues. In this way, the planning system raises consumer prices and depresses wages across the board, in a whole range of sectors of the economy.
Secondly, the planning system is in itself costly to administer, and it imposes additional compliance costs on businesses, as well as adding considerable uncertainty to business operations.
Thirdly, Britain’s housing shortage is not a symmetric problem affecting all parts of the country to the same degree. It is a highly asymmetrical problem, which tends to be worst in the most productive and prosperous parts of the country. It therefore discourages people from moving from low-productivity to high-productivity regions, thus holding back Britain’s overall productivity:
“[T]he house price differential […] acts to choke off this migration. House owners in the north find that they would be worse off if they sold up and moved, even if it meant moving out of unemployment into employment. Moreover, the problem appears to have been particularly evident for middle managers who have been unwilling to move south because they could not afford equivalent housing.”
Fourthly, it depresses savings and investment. When homeowners see large increases in their property wealth year after year, this reduces incentives to build up other forms of asset wealth, namely, by saving: their house, in a sense, does the saving for them. But while an individual household may be indifferent between having either an expensive house or a large savings account, from an economic perspective, the two are very much not equivalent. Too much of Britain’s savings are unproductively tied up in bricks and mortar.
And so on. What this means is that the housing crisis is not just one problem among many. Rather, it lies at the heart of most of Britain’s economic and social problems, and where it is not the primary cause, it is, at the very least, a major amplifier. All of these effects do not just persist to this day; they are vastly greater in magnitude now than they were then.
I will stop just short of calling Professor Evans a prophet. There are a few passages in the book which show that he was not, after all, a time traveler from 2025. For example, for Professor Evans, ‘development’ still mostly meant ‘towns and cities growing outwards, like they used to in the interwar period.’ He treated urban densification as an undesirable side effect of the restrictions on outward development, rather than as part of the solution. We now know that urban densification, renewal, and redevelopment also have a major role to play, and that planning restrictions and NIMBYism block those just as effectively as they block other forms of development. Nor am I convinced by his assessment that NIMBYs are essentially reasonable people, who just respond rationally to incentives. More recent developments suggest that NIMBYism is much more like a lifestyle choice than a response to the particulars of any development project. Nor did Professor Evans have much to say about the forms of NIMBYism that prevent activities such as infrastructure development or energy generation, which already existed then, even if they were not nearly as prominent as now.
Still: I enjoy the benefit of more than three and a half decades’ worth of hindsight, and even so—these comparatively minor criticisms are the best I can come up with. It would be an understatement to say that No Room! No Room! has aged exceptionally well.
Regardless, some readers will probably wonder: what is the point of republishing such an old study rather than writing a new and up-to-date one? Because, no matter how well No Room! No Room! may have aged—aged, it nonetheless has, and a lot of new information has emerged after that date.
The answer is: it is precisely the fact that this publication is, by definition, completely free from any form of hindsight bias which makes it so much more powerful. The point we want to make by republishing this study in its original form is precisely that it was already possible even then, based solely on the information that was available at the time, to see the outlines of Britain’s emerging housing crisis. Professor Evans did not have access to the volumes of literature on urban economics that have been published since then. He did not know how house prices, rents, housing affordability ratios or other measures were going to evolve over the coming decades. And he did not need to know any of that to get the basics right.
The fact that it was possible to see this so clearly as far back as 1988 makes it all the more scandalous that we have still not made any progress toward solving this issue. If it was already possible to know all this in 1988—what excuse could present-day housing policymakers possibly have for still not doing anything about it? What excuse could present-day housing commentators possibly have for continuing to obfuscate and muddy the waters?
This is why republishing the original book is a more powerful statement than writing a new one would have been.
I have added the occasional footnote in order to gently update the text a little, but without messing around with the original text, or disrupting the flow. The reader can, of course, choose to ignore those additional footnotes (which I have marked with my initials, KN), and just read this as an unaltered text from 1988. I have made no changes whatsoever to Professor Evans’s text, footnotes, or references, with the exception of one study which was published in 1989, and which was still listed as ‘forthcoming’ in the original.
While the problems Professor Evans originally identified in 1988 are all immeasurably worse today, the one silver lining is that unlike then (and indeed, unlike even a few years ago!), there now is a counter-reaction to the powerful NIMBY lobby. The small but vocal ‘YIMBY’ (Yes In My Back Yard) movement is a cross-ideological coalition, which is rare in these politically tribal times, when political opinions are more likely to come as set menus rather than pick-and-mix buffets. YIMBYs can be found on the centre-left, the centre, the centre-right, and, of course, among classical liberals and libertarians.
Among other things, No Room! No Room! can be read as a very early (proto-)YIMBY manifesto. It did not have anything like the influence on policy that it would have deserved, but it certainly helped to establish the IEA as a trailblazer for ‘YIMBYism’ (although that term would not enter British English until the late 2010s).
Other major IEA publications in the YIMBYism workstream include books such as Fifty Years of the Town and Country Planning Acts: Time to Privatise Land Development Rights? (Corkindale 1998), Liberating the Land: The Case for Private Land-Use Planning (Pennington 2002), and The Land Use Planning System: Evaluating Options for Reform (Corkindale 2004). I joined the fray in 2012, with a chapter on housing in my book Redefining the Poverty Debate – Why a War on Markets is No Substitute for a War on Poverty (Niemietz 2012).
While we take a certain pride in the consistency of our research output, and the fact that these publications tend to have a long shelf life—ideally, we would not want them to. Because, ultimately, the reason why No Room! No Room! still feels topical today is that nothing has improved. We would prefer to write a follow-up publication on how these old arguments are now no longer relevant, because the obstacles that once existed have been overcome, and Britain is successfully solving its housing crisis. Or, better still, one day, we would like a publication on the housing crisis to feel as quaint and out of date as a publication on the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia does today.
KRISTIAN NIEMIETZ
Editorial Director, Institute of Economic Affairs
London, January 2025
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